Monday, March 9, 2015

Agile Stance - A series of posts on Agile and Scrum

I'm going to write a series of posts around Agile and specifically Scrum and keep this page updated as a table of contents for all the posts in this series.

This is to help me aid and direct people for learning purposes and (to shamelessly use the pun), I'm going to keep the posts Agile and evolve them when and where necessary.

I'll start with a quick intro...

Agile is an approach that was originally created for software delivery and now widely used across a number of industries and in a blog I read a good while ago was used to effectively organise a family holiday.

It is an approach that uses iterations or cycles of a fixed amount of time to openly and clearly delivery a successful product rather than to just complete a project. This allows the product requirements to change during the course of the project (not the course of a iteration/cycle) to better align to the deliverable for success as opposed to not changing due to a locked down plan that leads to completing the project, albeit unsuccessfully.

Agile incorporates the ability to modify what is delivered without necessarily extending the duration, budget or scope (the three project constraints) of a project, but also does not necessarily prohibit the extension of one of these constraints.

Confusing?
Not really.

Simply put, if there is more work to complete because of our change, we could :

extend the duration in order to get these changes incorporated in the product

extend the cost by using additional resources to complete the change

Both of these would also extend the scope, because nothing was dropped from the scope to allow for the change.

drop an item of equal effort to the change from the scope would allow the project to continue on track without extending budget, duration or scope

Does this sound like your corporations dream? Being able to change whatever they want when they want, even mid-project? Well, it's flexible, but not quite that simple, it requires discipline in using Agile, in fact it requires a few disciplines and for those disciplines to be understood and adhered to by a few different people too.

These are what I would like to cover over the next few months of posts...